Tag: Change Assistant

This week on the podcast, Kyle recaps the Phire User Group meeting, his PTF talk, and shares a nice tip on integrating Usage Monitor with PTF scripts. Then, Dan and Kyle discuss the latest changes with HR Image 23 and PeopleTools 8.56 and forcing users to adopt new technologies.

This is a short post, but hopefully helpful. I recently discovered that you can turn on Change Assistant with a debug mode using an environment variable. There is no documentation on this, but it seems to work well and might help you resolve any issues you have with Change Assistant.

To enable the debug mode, set the PSCADBG environment variable. I used “true” for the value, but any value should work.

$env:PSCADBG="true"

Then launch Change Assistant from the command line:

c:\Program Files\PeopleSoft\Change Assistant\changeassistant.bat

In the command line you should see the debug output, like this:

Signed on to 'PSFTDB'. Using c:\PT8.55.13_Client_ORA\
Attempt to signon using PS/PS@PSFTDB
Controller sending c:\PT8.55.13_Client_ORA client -com.peoplesoft.pt.changeassistant.pshome.request.db.SignOnDatabase
Controller received from c:\PT8.55.13_Client_ORA client -com.peoplesoft.pt.changeassistant.pshome.request.db.SignOnDatabase
Signed on to 'PSFTDB'. Using c:\PT8.55.13_Client_ORA\

This week on the podcast, Kyle and Dan talk about planning PeopleTools and Catch-up projects, BI Publisher security, and how to turn off excessive BI Publisher logging. We also talk about slowly killing COBOL with PeopleSoft (it’s not dead yet) and using multiple Change Assistant installations.

One annoyance with Change Assistant (among a few) is that you have to start it “as Administrator”. If you don’t, you’ll get the message “Another instance of Change Assistant is already running” (even though it’s not). While running a program “as Administrator” is not hard, there is no reason why Change Assistant needs Administrative rights. (At least that I know of).

Folder Security

The fix to run Change Assistant without Administrator is to set the folder security permissions correctly. If you install Change Assistant to the default directory, C:\Program Files\PeopleSoft\Change Assistant, the Change Assistant folder security needs to be updated. Grant the user (or group) who will be running Change Assistant Full Control over the directory. In my case, I granted the group “Authenticated Users” full access to the folder.

Now you can start Change Assistant as a normal application.

PeopleTools Idea

There is an Idea on the Oracle PeopleSoft Space for the PeopleTools team to fix this. If you want to vote for the Idea, you can do that here.

I don’t remember where I originally saw this solution, so I can’t give appropriate credit, but I want to thank whoever posted about this in the past.

This week on the podcast, Dan and Kyle talk about a ransomware attack, load balancer health checks, applying POC patches and complain about minor annoyances in Change Assistant. Kyle shares a story about a misbehaving pagelet and how he investigated the issue.

We want to make this podcast part of the community discussion on PeopleSoft administration. If you have comments, feedback, or topics you’d like us to talk about, we want to hear from you! You can email us at podcast@psadmin.io, tweet us at @psa_io, or use the Twitter hashtag #psadminpodcast.

This week on the podcast, Kyle and Dan record from the Elastic{on} Conference in Chicago. We attended the conference to learn more about Elasticsearch and the Elastic platform. The tl;dr, we are excited about the future of the Elasticsearch and the Elastic ecosystem. We also talk about purging log files, Change Assistant and passwords, and sharing PSPing results.

We want to make this podcast part of the community discussion on PeopleSoft administration. If you have comments, feedback, or topics you’d like us to talk about, we want to hear from you! You can email us at podcast@psadmin.io, tweet us at @psa_io, or use the Twitter hashtag #psadminpodcast.

This week Dan talks about his 8.55 Go-Live weekend, simplifying patch download with getMOSPatch, and using Kyle’s Maintenance Backdoor. Then Kyle and Dan discuss strategies and tips to make Go-Live weekends successful.

We want to make this podcast part of the community discussion on PeopleSoft administration. If you have comments, feedback, or topics you’d like us to talk about, we want to hear from you! You can email us at podcast@psadmin.io, tweet us at @psa_io, or use the Twitter hashtag #psadminpodcast.

This week Kyle and Dan talk about scripting Change Assistant, DPK Patching and how many PeopleSoft customers plan on staying with the platform. The podcast ends with Dan sharing his Oh No! story about Go-Live passwords.

We want to make this podcast part of the community discussion on PeopleSoft administration. If you have comments, feedback, or topics you’d like us to talk about, we want to hear from you! You can email us at podcast@psadmin.io, tweet us at @psa_io, or use the Twitter hashtag #psadminpodcast.

There are three main steps to getting your PeopleTools 8.55 database patched:

Install the new PeopleTools Client (and Change Assistant version)

Configure your target environment

Run the PeopleTools patch command

Let’s look at each step.

PeopleTools Client and Patch Files

The first step is to install the updated PeopleTools client using the Client DPK (PeopleTools Patch Client Install section). When you install the client, make sure you select “PeopleTools Patch” or “Full PeopleTools Upgrade”. Both of those options will create a PTP folder under the client home. The PTP folder will contain the PeopleTools Patch (PTP) .zip files and Change Assistant expects those files in the PTP folder. Make sure you install the new Change Assistant version too. With 8.55, you can install more than one version of Change Assistant; I used the convention C:\Program Files\PeopleSoft\Change Assistant-8.55.xx for the install path.

Change Assistant Configuration

In the updated version of Change Assistant, you need to create an environment definition for the target database. If the environment existed in an older version of Change Assistant, use the new Import feature under “Tools > Export/Import Change Assistant Settings”. If you don’t have an environment defined, to to “File > New Database” to create it. For your target database, change the PS_HOME directory to the new PeopleTools Client folder. Verify and Save the environment definition.

Automate

Open a command prompt and navigate to C:\Program Files\PeopleSoft\Change Assistant. We’ll kick off the PeopleTools Patch using the changeassistant.bat file. There are 4 parameters we specify:

-MODE: The Change Assistant mode to run (UM for Update Manager mode)

-ACTION: The change action to run (PTPAPPLY for a patch or PTUAPPLY for an upgrade)

-TGTENV: The target environment name

-UPD: PeopleTools Patch ID (PTP855xx)

Check the softwareupdatePTP855XX{-DBNAME}IP output folder (defined under Tools > Options > Output Directory in Change Assistant) for the logs. Change Assistant will create the usual logs, but you will also find a job.log file. job.log is the same output that you normally see in the left-pane inside Change Assistant.

I applied PeopleTools 8.55.08 (to an 8.55.05) database and the patch job took less than 10 minutes.